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L A D D I E   J O H N   D I L L

Laddie John Dill translates nature’s larger themes into his works; not just the appearance of land and atmosphere, but visual metaphors for the earth’s basics: geology, oceans, the ebb and flow of tides and streams, the telling effects of time. Works which relate more to cycles and epochs than to moments of individual experience.

In a 1978 Baxter Art Gallery catalog on Laddie John Dill, Curator Michael Smith developed associations between Dill’s work and that of certain masters of the European modern tradition—the sculpture of Brancusi and Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp’s acceptance of chance as formal element.

While not disputing such associations, they do represent a Eurocentric view. In suggesting Duchamp’s use of chance as Dill’s model for allowing the sand in his early works to flow and assume its own shape we may be headed down a narrowing pathway at best—and missing a promising road; one that leads from the rich tenets of Oriental art, especially those of Chinese landscape painting. Indeed, Duchamp’s regard for chance is a process long revered in Chinese painting. Chinese artists were trained to court chance in seeking the pathways to art. For the processes intrinsic to their primary painting materials—paper and ink—led to techniques that in themselves were eloquent metaphors for nature and time. The way ink and water flowed together re-enacted nature and lines seemed to grow from the brush as they defined the horizon, or searched along hidden paths to create patterned space were more important as visual metaphors than as devices to render natures appearance.

In comparison to the Oriental, Western art records relatively few masters of landscape: the Englishman Constable and Turner; Van Ruysdael and his Dutch followers, and of course the French Impressionists. Virtually all sought to depict the spirit of landscape through atmosphere and light and were inevitably caught up by the grandeur of sunlight, clouds and weather. And for the others, the Italians and Germans, landscape usually served as but a stage or background for human drama. Only rarely, as with Constable, was the landscape itself the main player, as it was with the countryman, Thomas Hardy, who, in his masterpiece, “The Return of the Native,” characterized the moor, Egdon Heath, as an embodiment of cosmic nature. The point is that the human figure—man and not nature—was the main focus of Western Art. Man was, as art historian Richard Tansey lectured, the “leitmotif” of Western Art.

Not so with the Asian artist. Though the human figure was usually present in Oriental landscape, it was usually subordinate to nature itself. Indeed, omnipresent nature and passing time laid art’s foundation on ground well prepared by Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

One can see strong metaphors for the earth in Dill’s choice of materials—cement, glass and pigments—and in his processes of casting, staining, and eroding: visual metaphors for the geological, the ameliorating effects of time, the ebb and flow of water and land, and the changes of weather and season. We sense both Dill’s kinship with the Oriental artist’s immersion in nature and his indifference to the Occidental predisposition to observe and analyze. Since his first exhibition in 1971 at the Sonnebend Gallery in New York City, Laddie John Dill has presented more than sixty solo exhibitions in public and private galleries throughout the U.S. and in Korea and Finland. In addition his works have been included in more that one-hundred-fifty group exhibitions in galleries and public museums in the U.S., Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and Russia. He is also represented in the collections of the following museums and public institutions:


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